The Attributional Responses of Young Female Athletes after Winning, Tying, and Losing

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Abstract
This study examined the attributions of young female athletes (N = 163) for their personal and their team's performance after winning, tying, and losing a competitive soccer game. Players' attributions were made to the internal factors of ability and effort and to the external factors of opponent difficulty and luck. It was proposed that the opportunities for tying and losing players to make self-protecting external ascriptions would be limited by situational constraints operating in competitive sport that reduce the plausibility and acceptability of such defensive responses. Overall, the findings provided support for this situational constraint notion. Additionally, the results of this field study with young female soccer players generally were consistent with the findings of a previous study involving young male soccer players, suggesting that game outcome has a similar impact on the attributional responses of girls and boys.